Load balancer

TODO Load balancers at Enterprise level vs Application level

Doubt:

If a company is using a load balancer like F5, why do teams have to think about it during setting up VPC, etc?

Sometimes, in a microservices approach, the load balancer is usually built into the API Gateway.

Load balancers gets the list of registered instances from the discovery server.

How is f5 used in enterprise? Is it load balancing?

F5 in the Enterprise: More Than Just Load Balancing

F5 is a prominent technology company that plays a crucial role in enterprise IT environments, best known for its load balancing solutions. However, its offerings extend far beyond simple traffic distribution, encompassing a suite of application delivery and security services.

At its core, F5 technology is designed to ensure that applications are fast, secure, and available to users. This is primarily achieved through a key function called load balancing.

The Cornerstone: F5 Load Balancing

Load balancing is the process of distributing network traffic across multiple servers to ensure that no single server becomes overwhelmed. This is critical for businesses that need to maintain high availability and optimal performance for their applications and services. F5’s BIG-IP product suite is a central component of this, acting as an Application Delivery Controller (ADC) to intelligently manage traffic.

Here’s how F5’s load balancing benefits an enterprise:

1. High Availability: By distributing traffic, if one server fails, the load balancer automatically reroutes traffic to the remaining healthy servers, preventing downtime.
2. Scalability: As traffic to an application grows, new servers can be seamlessly added to the resource pool, and the load balancer will begin distributing traffic to them.
3. Performance Optimization: F5 load balancers can direct traffic to the server that is best able to handle the request, based on various methods like server capacity or the number of existing connections. This reduces latency and improves the user experience.
4. Health Monitoring: F5 devices constantly check the health of servers in a pool. If a server is not responding correctly, it is temporarily taken out of rotation until it becomes healthy again.

F5 employs various load balancing methods, which can be broadly categorized as static and dynamic. Static methods, like Round Robin, distribute traffic in a predetermined sequence. Dynamic methods, on the other hand, take into account the real-time performance of servers, making more intelligent traffic distribution decisions.

Beyond Load Balancing: A Suite of Enterprise Services

While load balancing is a foundational element, F5’s role in the enterprise has evolved to address a wider range of application-related challenges. Their products and services now focus on what they call “application delivery and security.”

This expanded portfolio includes:

1. Web Application and API Protection (WAAP): F5 provides robust security solutions to protect web applications and APIs from a variety of threats, including DDoS attacks and malicious bots.
2. Multi-Cloud Management: As enterprises increasingly adopt multi-cloud strategies, F5 offers solutions to manage and secure applications consistently across different cloud environments.
3. Online Fraud Prevention: F5 has developed technologies to detect and prevent online fraud, protecting businesses and their customers.
4. DNS Services: F5 offers DNS solutions to ensure high performance and availability for applications by streamlining traffic, optimizing security, and reducing response times.
5. Unified Mobility: Through its BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM), F5 helps enterprises manage and secure access to applications for their mobile workforce.

In essence, while F5 is fundamentally associated with load balancing, its true value in the enterprise lies in its comprehensive suite of solutions that ensure applications are not only available and performant but also secure and accessible in today’s complex IT landscape.

Does F5 sit before or after apigee in a corporate environment?

F5 is Positioned Before Apigee in a Typical Corporate Environment

In a standard corporate network architecture, F5 solutions, particularly its BIG-IP Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs), are typically positioned before Google’s Apigee API gateway. This strategic placement allows each platform to perform its specialized functions in a logical sequence, ensuring efficient and secure application and API delivery.

The typical flow of traffic in such an environment is as follows: a client request first hits the F5 BIG-IP system, which then forwards it to the Apigee gateway. Apigee, in turn, processes the API-specific aspects of the request before it reaches the backend services.

The Role of F5 at the Edge

F5’s primary role at the entry point of the network is to provide robust load balancing and security. Key functions performed by F5 in this position include:

1. Load Balancing: F5 BIG-IP distributes incoming traffic across multiple Apigee gateway instances. This ensures high availability and scalability of the API gateway layer, preventing any single instance from being overwhelmed.
2. SSL Offloading: F5 can handle the decryption and encryption of SSL/TLS traffic. This offloads a computationally intensive task from the Apigee gateways, freeing up their resources to focus on API management.
3. Web Application Firewall (WAF): F5’s Advanced WAF capabilities provide a critical layer of security, protecting against a wide range of web application attacks and DDoS mitigation. This initial security screening helps to ensure that only legitimate traffic reaches the Apigee gateway.
4. Health Checks: F5 continuously monitors the health of the Apigee routers to ensure that traffic is only sent to healthy instances.

Apigee’s Role as the API Gateway

Once the traffic has been processed by F5, it is passed to Apigee, which manages the full lifecycle of APIs. Apigee’s responsibilities include:

1. API-specific Security: Apigee enforces security policies tailored to APIs, such as OAuth 2.0, API key validation, and threat protection against XML and JSON attacks.
2. Traffic Management: It handles API-specific traffic management, including rate limiting, quotas, and caching.
3. Mediation and Transformation: Apigee can transform message formats and protocols to ensure compatibility between clients and backend services.
4. Analytics and Monitoring: It provides detailed analytics and monitoring of API traffic, offering insights into usage patterns and performance.

This layered approach, with F5 at the edge and Apigee as the API management layer, is a well-established best practice. It leverages the strengths of both platforms to create a highly available, secure, and scalable architecture for delivering modern applications and services. A presentation on datacenter failover scenarios even illustrates an F5 load balancer distributing traffic across Apigee instances. Furthermore, discussions around client timeouts often highlight the need to configure the load balancer’s timeout (like F5) to be longer than Apigee’s timeout, reinforcing the sequence of F5 before Apigee.